Word: opal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Opal Mehta, just a high school senior, lives her life on this stairway. Pushed by immigrant parents for whom Harvard admission is a matter of family pride, Opal has spent her life following a series of multi-step plans, each with its own abbreviation (“How Opal Will Get Into Harvard,” HOWGIH, is replaced by “How Opal Will Get a Life,” HOWGAL) and all of them with one destination: Harvard...
...nonstop coverage, however, the popular press has continually missed one crucial angle: the perspective of the organization kids themselves. This is Viswanathan’s contribution. Though her pop sociology is perhaps even less subtle than the professional caricature artist Tom Wolfe, “Opal Mehta” nevertheless far outperforms “I Am Charlotte Simmons” in the department of insight...
Like David Brooks’ Organization Kid, Opal Mehta is a professional student. Over the course of the book, she also becomes a professional partier; “fun” is just one more category to check off her resume. To learn to dance, Opal watches a music video by Beyonce with a pen and paper in hand: “Swivel hips left, then forward,” she writes for the purposes of later memorization. To learn to have fun, she studies teen movies...
Like Brooks and Lewis, Viswanathan is not a fan of this approach. “You can put the girl in couture,” one of the Haute Bitchez tells Opal, “but you can’t put the couture in the girl.” Similarly, put the automaton in Manolo Blahniks and all you get is an automaton in uncomfortable shoes...
...Viswanathan’s insights are good, and her ability to broadcast them to an international audience of Organization Kids might have been a blessing. Unfortunately, though, “Opal Mehta” squanders the opportunity to debunk the mightily popular myth that, as Opal says early in the book, “Harvard just about equals success in the world”—and nothing is more important than success...